The first answer in the laboratory chronology was not a man's name. It was a connection among three cases.
In December 1996, according to the prosecution's factual basis, the Orange County Sheriff's crime laboratory established DNA links among the Harrington, Witthuhn, and Cruz cases. The murders had occurred in different years. The material now connected them in a way that did not depend solely on a resemblance between accounts of the crimes.
By then, the last of those killings was already a decade in the past. Janelle Cruz had been eighteen when she was killed in Irvine in May 1986. Keith and Patrice Harrington had died in Dana Point in 1980; Manuela Witthuhn in Irvine in 1981. The three case names were becoming part of a common evidentiary history long after the people behind them had been lost.
I drew the first line between the three entries. Nothing about the line diminished the years before it. The result arrived in 1996, not on the day any of those cases began. An investigator at an earlier scene could preserve something whose later significance had not yet become available. The material could outlast an investigative theory, a particular assignment, or the immediate hope that an answer was close.
The next connection crossed a county boundary.
In 1998, the same laboratory linked the Orange County cases to the Ventura case. Lyman and Charlene Smith, whose deaths had been discovered in 1980, now appeared within the chain of reported DNA connections. A case in one county was providing information relevant to cases in another. The expanding line on my page no longer fitted inside the place where the first laboratory connection had been reported.
The years of the crimes and the years of the comparisons occupied separate columns. That arrangement exposed the slow advance more clearly than the aliases had. Across one column, the crimes followed their terrible sequence. Across the other, evidence from those events was being joined, later, through further testing.
June 2001 brought another change. The prosecution's summary said the Orange County laboratory confirmed a match between profiles from Contra Costa sexual-assault cases and those from the Orange County and Ventura cases. The connection now reached beyond the Southern California murders. What had been separated by distance and by the outcomes of particular attacks was entering the same reported evidentiary chain.
A reader could move from 1996 to 2001 in three short paragraphs. For the people waiting, those paragraphs represented five more years. The gap was not empty simply because this public account recorded only its milestones. Work had produced new connections. It still had not produced a person whose identity authorities could announce.
The next dated laboratory development in this part of the account was April 2011. Additional testing by the California Department of Justice linked the Domingo and Sanchez murder case in Santa Barbara County to the other cases through CODIS. The network on my sheet gained another branch. There was more agreement among the evidence, and still an unanswered question at its center.
This was the difficulty that the public campaign of 2016 inherited. Authorities were not merely wondering whether widely separated crimes might resemble one another. They had a history of reported laboratory connections, built over years, and evidence against which a potential suspect could be assessed. What they lacked was the identity needed to turn that capacity toward the right person.
I had expected the laboratory chronology to end with an answer. Instead, it ended with a more sharply defined absence. The profiles could connect cases across California. The national effort could assess people. Between those abilities lay the identification problem that had survived into 2016.
The next advance would require more than another line between old cases. Before that advance came, the agencies had to keep the question alive long enough to pursue it.